Government by the people? What people?

Anyone who has doubts that gerrymandering is the enemy of democracy in action should look at these numbers from the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform:

In Illinois, 46 state House candidates and 21 state Senate candidates were uncontested in both the primary and general election this year. Effective gerrymandering by the Democrats, who controlled the process this time around, contributed to those discouraging statistics.

That's 35.6 percent of the candidates for the House and 40.7 percent of candidates for the Senate.

That's a pretty big bloc of legislators who will be sworn in on Jan. 9 without getting a single vote in an actual election campaign.